This is the sixth step in a series of posts – a guide that I’m writing that will help walk you through setting up your own website, on your own domain name, using WordPress as a content management system.

Now that you have your website up and running, it’s time to explore the wealth of plugins that are available for WordPress.

Plugins are part of what makes WordPress such a great framework to build a website with. There are thousands and thousands of plugins out there that are each designed to do something that WordPress can’t do for itself right out the box.

Some of these plugins are extremely useful and some of them aren’t.

Some of these plugins are free and some of them aren’t.

Just because a plugin is free doesn’t mean that it isn’t as good as a plugin that someone is charging for.

For most people, the first two plugins that they are exposed to are “Akismet” and “Hello Dolly.”

Akismet is a anti-spam plugin that is designed to prevent people from coming onto your new site and leave comment spam. Comment spam is very common on the internet. It involves people (or computer programs) coming to someone’s site and leaving a worthless comment that usually includes links to their own site. Usually this is done to promote someone’s viagra or cialis site.

Hello Dolly is, well, useless.

So first things first, we’re going to activate Akismet and then go on to finding other useful plugins. Go click on “Activate” right under the Akismet tab. That will bring up this screen:

WordPress helpfully points out that you need to enter your WordPress API key for Akismet to work. So click on that link, and go to this screen and follow the directions on the detailed diagram below:

Once you’ve done all that, Akismet will now constantly be working behind the scenes to keep spam off your new website.

But we’re not done adding plugins quite yet. Let’s add a plugin that will allow your readers to contact you via e-mail. First, go to the “Add New” tab under the “Plugins” tab:

And then you search for what you’re looking for – in this case, a contact form:

Once you click “Search Plugins” to the right, you get taken to this screen, where you can see the plugins that are available:

Usually it’s a safe bet to go with the highest rated plugin that performs a particular task, although not always. Due to the fact that I’ve used Contact Form 7 on several sites, I can vouch for it as doing exactly as it says.

So once you click on install, you’ll see this:

Now that the contact form plugin is installed on your site, click on the “Activate Plugin” link to activate it and go to the next screen:

Once a plugin is activated there is usually a place on the left-hand-side menu to change the settings for that plugin. Usually the new menu choice can be found under the “Settings” menu tab, but not always.

With the Contact Form 7 plugin, you get your own little menu addition. It looks like this:

Once you have this up, highlight and copy the code that’s pointed out for you to copy. Note that your left-hand-side menu has changed, it now has a settings tab for the contact form plugin. So once you grab that code up at the top of the screen, let’s set up your new contact form.

You may have wandered through this menu section before – the pages section. Pages are basically parts of your site that are intended to be more static than regular posts. Usually, pages are good spots to put “About Us” sections, menu items and contact forms. This is what the “Pages” section of your site looks like:

It’s very important to remember that WordPress Pages are not the same thing as WordPress Posts. Right now we’re just working with pages.

As you get more comfortable with the different concepts, you can fiddle around with creating and deleting pages a bit more. For now, just do what I tell you or you’ll get a knife in the throat.

As you can see in the detailed and professionally-done image above, there are several elements to be aware of when looking at the “Add New Page” screen in WordPress.

First and foremost is the page title field. This is where you put the title of the page. In this instance, it’s going to be “Contact Allen” – because we want people to contact Allen. Because he’s so friendly and loving.

Once that’s done, click on the HTML code tab. This will show you everything in an HTML friendly way. If you put code into your pages at some point, you will want to use this tab. If you have your HTML tab up, you can paste that Contact Form 7 code that you copied earlier into the field that actually contains the content of the page. I’ve helpfully labeled it “You Write Stuff Here.”

For pages, you’ll probably want to go to the “Discussions” section at the bottom and uncheck “Allow Comments” and “Allow Pings.” Contact pages don’t need to have the ability for people to leave comments on them.

Here’s what I added for AllenSelby.com’s contact page:

Note the “Url” that I pointed out. If you ever want to send someone directly to this contact page, you can just send them that url. WordPress is nice in that it handles all that behind-the-scenes stuff.

So, once you have your contact page set up, hit “Publish” and go to your site. There, you’ll see something like this:

Notice that I now have a new page – the “Contact Allen” page. You should have something like that on your site now. If someone goes to your domain, they will now have the opportunity to fill in the fields, hit send and magically send a message to you!

And that’s just awesome.

Feel free to experiment with plugins and see what works best for you. In the next post I’ll list a slew of WordPress plugins that I’ve used in the past and that I’ve found useful.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

Registering a Domain Name
Choosing a Web Hosting Company: Hawk Host or Liquid Web
Pointing Your Domain Name to Your Web Host
Using cPanel and Fantastico to Put Up Your First Website
Changing The Default WordPress Settings On Your First Website
Locating, Loading And Activating Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website
A List Of Useful WordPress Plugins

Share on Facebook